Platoon & Xenophobe retrospective: Sunsoft sundowns | NES Works
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- čas přidán 18. 10. 2022
- Sunsoft blew our minds with Blaster Master, but the company did not suddenly become some 8-bit powerhouse after releasing that game. Here's the rocky portion of their road to greatness, a pair of NES conversions that will leave you scratching your head. In the case of Platoon, you'll be left wondering why they thought THIS license was suitable to a platform primarily advertised and sold to children. In the case of Xenophobe, you'll be confused about how meager a port such a technically adept company managed to produce.
Production note: NES footage captured from @analogueinc Mini. Arcade footage captured from MiSTer FPGA cores; special thanks to @MiSTerAddons. Video upscaled to 720 with XRGB Mini Framemeister.
Video Works is funded via Patreon ( / gamespite ) - support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its CZcams debut! Plus, exclusive podcasts, eBooks, and more! - Hry
I misread the "Morale" meter in Platoon as "Moral" and just imagined it subversively ticking down as the game progressed
The h o r r o r
The reason Stalone's face is like that is because when he was born the doctor disfigured him with forceps. It left his mouth looking like that, and it effected his speech as well. If you ask me it's very admirable that he was able to overcome these disabilities and become one of the most famous actors of all time.
I loved Platoon on the NES. Growing up we didn’t have a lot and my Dad found copies of Platoon and Operation Wolf brand new for $5 each at an outlet store. They were two of the only five games I had and I loved them both. Played both until I beat them several times.
RoboCop is a pretty brutal film. The fact it got made into kid's toys and a cartoon is a delightfully cynical. Gotta love the 80s.
There was also a children's cartoon and toy line based on Rambo.
@@ginormousaurus8394 The wild thing about the late 80's and early 90's in retrospect to me was the marketing of ultraviolent movies to kids with toy lines and the odd cartoon or comic books. Toxic Crusader, Terminator, Predator and Aliens among others spring to mind.
Cynical, but pretty much expected back then. As a dude who saw Robocop in theaters (with both siblings) as a grade schooler, every R-rated IP holder knew their content may have appealed to children.
Obviously, they sanitized the kid-targeted adaptations and toys, since they had to be sold to parents who may never show the source material to their kids. But that's nothing new. Ever read the source material for classic Disney animated films?
Funnily enough, the main appeal of Robocop to me when I was a kid was him breaking out of his programming and finding his humanity again. A point of the story that seemed to be lost on just about every adult around me. I still get chills when I hear those triumphant horns in the theme song.
My dad was a Nam vet and he said out of all the films about what happened over there, "Apocalypse Now" was the one that really nailed it.
I'm still disappointed that we never got a first-person shooter adaptation of Old Yeller
Xenophobe rekindles strong memories of a lazy summer where I had turned a van into a clubhouse, complete with 13 inch CRT TV sitting on the interior engine cover. Xenophobe and G.I. Joe Atlantis Factor were my 2 big rentals during that time.
The idea of a van as a clubhouse makes the inner 11-year-old in me light up. 'Course, I would have pretended the van was actually a deep space survival pod or exploration vessel....
That whole William Defoe death scene (and the eye contact between Charlie Sheen and Tom Bergener that follows) is insane over the top movie making at its finest. Didn’t really expect it to ever show up on this channel. Now we just need a game where players try to get off three shots with an old Italian bolt-action rifle in 5.6 seconds.
My rental place didn't give out manuals (just a very brief and at times vague instruction sticker on the plastic rental case - I rented Hydlide twice and never did figure out how I was supposed to attack). And I wasn't a Nintendo Power subscriber until the Dragon warrior offer. But when it came to my man Duke Togo, best believe I dug deep & found the perspicacity to clear that maze.
Gotta say I quite enjoy the retro 80s Max Headroom cyberpunk aesthetic you've got going in the live shots. 😎
Actually, the computer versions of the Platoon game is originally made by Ocean Software, Data East published the DOS version in the USA. (Also, the best version of the Platoon computer game is the C64 version because of its good SID music.)
Yup. By this stage Jeremy seems to have a willfully deliberate ignorance of UK gaming.
The c64 version of platoon really had a banger of a soundtrack tho.
Platoon was such a scary game when I was a kid.
"Xenophobe" was the game I rented when my mom got into a car accident when I had to return it. She broke her hip, the car was totaled and seventh-grade me felt like absolute shit because of it, so I hate that game to this day.
Platoon was an Ocean game. Ocean was to the UK what Bandai was to Japan and LJN/Acclaim was to the US. Mostly licensed drek.
For the era/platform, and being a quick licensed cash-in, Platoon has surprisingly good looking art. A proto-FPS would have been quite impressive even if it wasn't literally the first attempt on the NES. And the side scroller jungle sequences look a lot like what "Rambo" was trying to accomplish but failed. The characters are fairly large, etc. The jungle bushes look fairly natural compared to most of the pixel art rushed out with early tools in those days. I would have loved to hear some more about who exactly had worked on the art, or how it was made, if any of that sort of information is still known.
Yeah, I was surprised Jeremy didn't mention the graphics cause that's the one stand-out thing about that game.
The graphics are pretty closely taken from the uk computer versions. The c64 tunnel sequences were particularly impressive at the time.
If in Platoon your morale was hurt even if you successfully killed an enemy, so you had to play it more stealthy and passively observe the routines of Cong soldiers to determine how to slip past them, and at the end of the game the American soldiers themselves became a new enemy to avoid, that would make it a pretty good adaptation of Platoon.
Watching these videos is an interesting way of learning American history..!
amen
I think these games are better than the rap they get. Xenophobe has atmosphere in spades. The silence really adds to the tension and isolation. There’s also this quiet, low square wave tone that plays whenever the xenophobe logo on the bottom screen hits the top or bottom of its path that is sort of ominous. If xenophobe does have problems, it’s that it’s too easy and there should have been an ending. It loops infinitely. I never got my name published, but I sent my screenshot to Nintendo Power after maxing out the score bar.
Platoon also has a very dark, depressing ambience (the music is great) that to me conveys anxiety and depression. It’s also rather awesome that an NES game takes on such intense concepts. You literally can go into the VC village and kill the villagers. You also have to search their houses for the map and tunnel entrance, and the places are crawling with booby traps. That’s historically accurate, and reflects the mind f%#{k where civillians were secretly armed and likely to kill you-that’s what led to a lot of trauma in the US troops.
How cool is it that a freaking NES game portrayed the most controversial war in US history and took on this type of ethical conflict. That kind of thing wouldn’t be seen again for decades.
One thing Jeremy didn’t mention: Platoon was released in arcades on the Nintendo Vs. System. Wild.
Wonder if the license was partly done just because of the title? Like, they wanted a standard military term like Commando or Green Beret had, but Platoon was already taken by the film, so Data East just made a licensing deal just because they could.
Ocean had a tendency to buy a lot of movie licenses at the script stage, where they were fairly cheap; if the film ended up doing nothing the game probably wouldn't do well either, but Ocean kinda favored quantity over quality. So I'm guessing they didn't look too closely at any themes or subtext.
I've never heard anyone describe button jumping as civilized, but so true, and my feelings exactly. BTW, i would love to read a book from you that is dedicated exclusively to nes games based on R rated movies.
I had Platoon as a kid. I spent many hours playing this game. And this is the first time I've ever seen the second level.
Nintendo Power...where were you when I needed you most?!?!?!
Love the retro video look and effects on the self cam shots, nice window glare
“So what game do you want to pick up little Billy? The one about the cartoon Italian man punching blocks? The one about the quest to find the triforce? Perhaps some sort of space shooter?”
“Nah. I want the adaptation of the movie about the existential horror of the United States involvement with the Vietnam civil war”
“Cool what’s that game about”
“You shoot vietcong”
Pity there was never a room with a view adaptation. Perhaps a non-linear Hannah and her sisters point and click adventure
(greatworkperalways)
I love these 2 games.
Xenophobe makes the 7800 look good. How often does that happen? And the title screen song is amazing...for Amiga. Especially the version made on two Amigas, and included on the other side of the cassette. One day, I will even play the NES version.
Just not today.
Also, Platoon has that opening Ninja Gaiden style cinema, which was the best 8-bit trailer for an R-rated anti-war movie ever made. Plus, that feeling of being completely lost and miserable and then dying without warning to an enemy you've completely dehumanized? It's like the game Sensible Software lacked the balls to make.
Without this game to teach me what NES hard really means ("easy mode for casuals"), could I really have enjoyed Ghosts N' Goblins, Ninja Gaiden, and Battletoads? Would I have been so horrified by the American war machine's dreams of empire?
Okay, it probably didn't help with that last one at all. And it never should have been attempted. But just trying to sort out my thoughts on the matter, gave me more appreciation for the challenge you faced in creating this episode. Not just in getting past the first level, but in tackling the ethics this game has zero interest in engaging.
Well done, in threading that needle.
My father-in-law was a member of the Vietnamese government and was forced to flee for his life hours before the communist forces destroyed all the runways out of Saigon, so I’ve heard a few insider opinions about this topic.
@@JeremyParish
Thank you for sharing them and for sourcing them.
This is why I know I'm in good hands with your videos. Time and time again, you've demonstrated the instincts and the ethics of a good historian.
I won't name names, but there's other people tackling history on CZcams (not just gaming history), who make me question whether they have any sense of empathy at all.
Empathy doesn't pay the bills on a platform built to algorithmically drive audiences toward outrage and cruelty.
Platoon and Predator. Two licensed NES games that informed me to never buy licensed NES games in the future.
"Did anyone actually beat a Golgo 13 maze without consulting the maps in the manual or in Nintendo Power?" Given that they were in the manual that comes with the game, you weren't expected to do that. But to answer your question: yes, because my copy was secondhand. I learned the early mazes purely through exploring them and getting used to the space, and the big maze, I got out pen and graph paper and drew them one square at a time.
Both are among my favorite gaming experiences, so it's surprising it took me so long to get to the original Metroid, given it was designed around that as the primary challenge. I love standard Metroidvanias, but I do wish there were more games in whatever genre Metroid 1 is in. (Cartography games? Cryptic exploration game? Walking simulator?)
Castleroid
@@JeremyParish Careful, that castle's roided out! Unlike the protag of Platoon.
Waiting for next episode... I Always loved Castlevania II
Kudos for respectfully tackling some difficult subject matter in this retrospective. Platoon is certainly an odd NES title for this era.
The most interesting thing about either of these games may be that Xenophobe is the first NES game we've covered that I don't think I've EVER heard of. As one of those kids who read and re-read every page of every issue of Nintendo Power, that's quite a feat.
Zero for what such a cool concept, even if he couldn’t quite pay off in its era. I definitely appreciate the graphical style more now, in our anime, saturated world, then I did, when it originally released.
I suppose it would be a light reskin to make Xenophobe into the Cocoon movie adaptation we were all waiting for back then....
You timed this PERFECTLY with my morning break today. Literally as I sat in my car!!
Sunsoft should have released Full Metal Jacket for NES! Basic training could have been a Summer Games obstacle course to save the Drill Sargent, and the final stage could have been a Moonwalker scroller through a burning building to capture the teenage-sniper! Player-1 could be Joker and Player-2 could be Animal Mother! It's a missed opportunity!!!
"...taking unavoidable damage and killing aliens, until the game decides to let you stop." A summation very much in-line with the childhood memory of my one and only encounter with a Xenophobe arcade cabinet.
Platoon is the only NES game my dad ever forbade me from renting. Presumably the rationale was, “there’s no way that movie could turn into a game that’s appropriate for an eight-year-old.”
I liked Xenophobe it was fun to play with a friend, sunk many hours into that game back in the day.
I remember renting Platoon when I was a kid. I was confused, to say the least. That one never got rented again.
loved both of these as a kid, had them both because neither were SUPER popular and when id finally save up for a new game all the ones I wanted were ALWAYS sold out at the toy stores. so instead of coming home with SMB2 or Zelda2 or any of the popular in-demand games id come home with games like these or festers quest or Dr Chaos instead 😢
It's games like these that leave one thinking "how the mighty have risen."
Neither of these are great games, but in the arcade Xenophobe as its charms. It was a wildly ambitious concept that had to be cut down to meet production deadlines. The NES cuts out what little of that design remained.
Back in the early NES days, several game companies had newsletters they would send you if you filled out that numbered card in the back of Nintendo Power. The two I remember best are Taxan's (produced by Ken Lobb, just getting started) and Sunsofts, which had a guy doing anime-style artwork for a comic strip just doing whatever he wanted. He put the xenos from Xenophobe in a strip with Jason from Blaster Master for no reason other than that they were both made by the same company. I wish I still had those newsletters, but my parents always harped on me to throw stuff out.
2:57 Now I wished Toho had reskinned Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as an Apocalypse Now side scroller. Push 'B' to call in air strike, 'A' to never get off the boat.
Surprisingly this wasn’t the last Oliver Stone film to get a game. They also made a game of Scarface, which he wrote. It turned out better, at least.
The stacked images in the thumbnail sort of make it look like the chest bursting scene from Alien. Was this intentional, Jeremy?
Platoon was one of the first video games I ever played on my trusty Commodore 64 (the first ever game was Rambo funnily enough). I would have been around 9 and I don't think I got off the first level for the reasons you outlined. Still, watching this video has reminded me how wonderful the SID soundtrack was, so it had that going for it at least.
Of all the weird things to be NES games, it's Platoon. Why not Born on the Fourth of July? How about Full Metal Jacket? Jacob's Ladder?
Not a lot of Oliver Stone directed movies got console adaptions. But he was a writer for Conan the Barbarian, so that counts I guess.
Platoon is a game that you can just look at and go, "Yep, European computer game."
I bet you're glad it's one you don't have to cover on Famidaily.
I would put the blame for Platoon mostly on Ocean, who seemed to really excel at bad movie-to-game adaptations.
Yeah but army mans! Yo Joe!
Seriously though, I’d like to see a more faithful adaptation of the movie, in that it fully embraces the ethical dilemmas and is such an utterly harrowing slog to play through that it becomes a sort of darkly comedic spectacle. Not the plot of the game itself, but the fact that we’re playing something so dire. Or maybe we should wait for something that _hasn’t_ been licensed yet, like, idk, Grave of the Fireflies or Salò: 120 Days of Sodom
NES Platoon did have a really good soundtrack. Sunsoft got that right at least.
I only ever remember Xenophobe as one of the last games covered in a Consumer Guide book I got a book fair.
I swear to *god* I remember playing a version of _Xenophobe_ that had tall, skinny dudes in it wearing red and blue. I don't remember a duck person or anything like that.
Did Sunsoft put out _another_ version of this? Or did someone clone it? I thought it was _Xenophobe._ Am I insane!?
I remember in elementary school a buddy of mine had Platoon. I'd never heard of the movie, but enjoyed the game for the 5 minutes I stayed alive. When I saw the movie in the rental store, I begged my mom to let me rent it. Surely the movie the game was based on was just as good. She, understandably so, would always tell me no.
I caught glimpses of it on late-night HBO but didn't understand what I was watching. It wasn't until high school that I learned about the Vietnam War and read things like, "The Things They Carried" (an excellent book about the pressures of Vietnam, I highly recommend it). I ended up watching the entirety of Platoon and oh man was my mom spot on about not letting me watch it.
So many video games were influenced by the Alien movies: Xenophobe, Contra, Metroid, Alien Syndrome, R-Type, Alien Crush, etc. Even Ecco the Dolphin and Streets of Rage 2 contained Alien knockoffs.
My brother could do the golgo 13 mazes but I never could, I made him do it for me, but still never managed to beat that last gallery type shooting part at the end
Both of these games reek of ghost development, if for no other reason than Sunsoft's house sound driver going completely unused in either. Tracking down the sound programmers alone is nearly impossible. Platoon credits music by "NEW" and sound programming by "A.T," and Xenophobe has a very Eurogame/demoscene sound to its triangle channel hits, and features no credits at all. Comparing either game against Nankin no Adventure released around the same time, which very clearly has the Sunsoft house sound, paints a pretty clear picture of outsourcing.
I can’t speak to the nes version but platoon on the c64 was pretty highly regarded at the time of release. I was gifted a copy as a young teen and enjoyed it immensely. Sure it was extremely challenging but got good enough to usually make it to the last level. I found the game very moody and atmospheric with good sound and visuals. Was there no bunker stage with the flare gun in the nes version?
I've been wanting to add Xebophobe to the collection and finally found it last week. On my second run I maxed out the score, is there a way to make it harder? Like, no joke, is that normal for there to be like NO challenge?
Oh, seems like I dodged a bullet not buying Xenophobe on strength of Sunsoft name only!
Xenophobe was fun with 2 players. Not very good but still kinda fun.
Who’s that dude from Return of the Killer Tomatoes?
0 videos since golgo13 was referenced on the channel
"Did anyone actually complete a _Golgo 13_ labyrinth without referring to the maps printed in the manual and in _Nintendo Power?_ Absolutely not."
Oh come on, let's be fair here, mate. You know somewhere some nerd did a set of D&D style hand-drawn maps through trial and error.
The most interesting quality in Platoon is that it has a very strong sense of atmosphere, but that atmosphere is kinda gross. The music is pretty solid too.
Platoon also has the first 0 second speedrun. If cartridge pin #14 (CPU R/W) fails to connect properly, the game will directly boot to a glitched ending.
Damn I want to play some Top Secret Episode now. Bad
Face it, you've got Golgomania!
@@JeremyParish lol yes sir I do
I remember having xenophobe and being hyper disappointed...
Platoon is an excellent 80's war movie 🎬 🎞 🎥. 😀👍🎮
Now this I CAN agree on!
I miss the 8bit r rated games for kids childhood I had
Platoon on some game hint video. The game felt so slow and the character just flops over when they die. lol
Platoon was better on the Commodore 64 and Amiga. While the NES port is faithful enough, Platoon was better suited to the home computers of that era.
What TV Show is that at the beginning? "Buffalo Bill"? EDIT: Just found out. It's "Roseanne".
Roseanne. George Clooney played Roseanne and Jackie's foreman in the first season.
Proud that Jeremy resisted the urge to make a Xenophobic pun for the title
Xenophobe strikes me as one of those games that must have tested well in the development office, but I've never seen a simultaneous cooperative three way session really take off. As a kid I'd drop a quarter in and struggle with the controls and run out of ammo. I love the concept, but it feels out of place for a late 80's quarter muncher arcade game.
Unfortunately, I don't know of too many other split screen co-op arcade games. When I think arcade co-op I think belt-scroller/brawler - which from a bird's eye view are identical.
Edit: I'd said it before, I'll say it again - Wing of Madoola kinda plays like a game ahead of its time, but I wish it saw a remake/sequel on the late era NES so we're not left with "solid blue sky, three colored trees, weird sound effects." - basically whatever Castlevania III did for the Castlevania series.
Xenophobe as an arcade game is a little too overtuned- so many enemies, most of which can knock you down and make you drop your weapon so you have to either be very careful or get used to punching, a harsh time limit for each level, etc. Obviously designed to get your quarters but the best arcade games gave a little more value for money so as to keep players coming back.
As I said in the previous version of this video, Atlantis no Nazo would almost have been a better choice than Platoon, which really wasn't a good choice for a video game. (Then again, Call of Duty wants to do an Iraq War game now, ugh). And, next time, what a horrible night to have a curse (I like Simon's Quest).
Wow. There's something more than a little tasteless about marking an FPS set in Iraq to an age demographic who might've lost parents in the same war. Could you imagine asking some 20 year old to re-enact a convoy mission that sent his dad home in a closed box?
Excellent episode, Jeremy, totally agree with your take on the Vietnam war, what a nightmare.
Boy, you sassy in this one!
so platoon was actually a bad game and i wasn't just a stupid baby. good to know.
The PC footage I've seen looks like it worked a lot better in that format. Just a shaky port to NES with very little consideration given to difficulty balancing.
I think I played the nes xenophobe and yeah it sucks
I had Platoon growing up, I loved the soundtrack, but kinda hated the game, lol.
Next time: What a horrible night to talk about this next game.
From a certain point of view, it makes perfect sense to launch platoon on the NES - I think Sunsoft was testing the audience of the console to see if more older people were playing the NES and not only the children... it was an experiment to see if more mature content would sell. Kinda like some trailblazers on the gaming marketing research
I LOVED Xenophobe in the arcade, especially if you had all 3 players playing. The NES version......not good.
Appreciate the intro... I remember being shocked upon seeing First Blood for the first time, after growing up knowing Rambo from being taken to see the third one as a kid by a friend's dad (my parents would never have let me go to any movie like that), and then looking up information on the book it was based on... it's very sad that something like First Blood, which is not only anti-war, but has average corrupt cops as the villains, was so quickly morphed into braindead US war propaganda in its sequels. Robocop suffered the same fate, too.
I prefer the sequel Super Platoon, also known as Splatoon
I wouldn't judge the Platoon game so harshly for it's subject matter, it's more than likely from the impetus of the Ocean-developed original to the Sunsoft port of just getting a notable movie IP that people know to attach to a game and try to make some money. Even with the Vietnam War still being a bit of a touchy subject at the time, probably no one was reading that far into it if they cared at all.
Platoon sucked at the time and sucked later even when playing it on an emulator with save state capability.
The jungle scene was annoying as hell and I found the ending race against the clock to be completely broken.
Xenophobe? Great arcade game and Lynx game, utterly unplayable on NES. The choices of how they did some things helped kill it for me, as they appear to have gone from the life cycle of “egg, facehugger, roller, snotterpiller” to “random spawns everywhere.”
The idea should be “take them out quickly before you are dealing with snotterpillers”, not “snotterpillers randomly generating everywhere.”
Xenophobe got one rental back in the day never to be played again. Platoon got other tries down the road before I said “Screw it” and decided to play something slightly less frustrating like Milton’s Secret Castle.
Platoon played way better on the C64.
That was painful to watch.
Ah yes, 80s microcomputer games. Why do one thing well, when you can do foir things badly? Although I suppose that might as well have been Ocean's company slogan. You can really detect the Ocean stink the moment you see it in NES games. When an NES game plays as poorly as a late era C64 game, chances are it's Ocean-created cack, as is the case with Platoon. And Robocop 2. And so many terrible licensed games that somehow escaped LJN's greedy clutches.
Usually there is a takeaway, or something I find interesting, but I have to admit these both look pretty soulless.
The NES Xenophobe keeps reverting you to your base gun after the level completes, which basically ruins the game.
I owned xenophobe. One of the worst NES games ever. Dull and lifeless.
"I'm just trying to improve employee/management relations."
CUT TO: Xenophobe cartridge
Clever. A little too clever... Dislike.
While everyone who isnt financially profiting from such decisions is obviously going to agree with you on the absurdity of America's involvement in Vietnam not being declared war, to call it "uniquely American," is disenginous.
The current invasion of Ukraine is also not classified as "war" but rather a "special military operation," by Russia, and it's unlawful to refer to it as "war" by a Russian living in Russia.
They do this to avoid treaty repercussions. Its bizzare that the aggressor in an invasion gets to decide if the international community has a legal right to intervene. What if the Nazis had known of such trickery?
Like computers, Hollywood, and video games, war atrocities are one of our key export commodities. See also: The Nazis workshopping their oppression of the Jewish and LGBT community by taking notes from Henry Ford.
Youre the man Jeremy, this series is the best we love you
𝐘𝐎𝐔'𝐑𝐄 𝐇𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘